The Burning Church at Shalalth: Two Eyewitness Accounts in St'át'imcets

The Burning Church at Shalalth: Two Eyewitness Accounts in St’át’imcets Henry Davis The University of British Columbia Abstract: This paper consists of two transcribed, translated, and analyzed St’át’imcets (Lillooet) texts, both eyewitness accounts of the same event: the fire which consumed the village hall and the church at Tsal’álh (Shalalth) in 1948. The first is by Tommy Link and was recorded by Christine L. J. Clark in Lillooet Hospital around 1964–5. The second is by Carl Alexander and was recorded at Nxwísten (Bridge River) in February 2019. The stories are of interest both linguistically and historically; they differ in their account of how the fire started, and as such provide insight into how oral history is constructed from multiple perspectives, even from participants who had direct experience of the original event. Keywords: Upper St’át’imcets, Northern Interior Salish, Shalalth, narrative, oral history 1 Introduction About five years ago, I was entrusted with a miscellaneous collection of St’át’imcets (Lillooet) reel-to-reel and cassette tapes. Most of them turned out to be copies of narratives recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Randy Bouchard of the BC Indian Languages Project. Since then, Bouchard himself has made available digital copies of all the Upper St’át’imcets material that he recorded, and John Lyon and I are in the process of preparing a three-volume collection of the very rich linguistic heritage that he has bequeathed (see Lyon & Davis 2018 for a sampler from Sam Mitchell, whose stories will comprise the first volume). One St’át’imcets story in the original collection, however, did not fit: it was not recorded by Bouchard, and there was no attribution either on the recording or its cover. I transcribed it with the help of Carl Alexander, now of Nxwísten (Bridge River), but originally from Tsal’álh (Shalalth).1 It was recorded in Lillooet hospital from a speaker from Tsal’álh, whom Carl was able to identify as the late Tommy Link. Its subject matter is an account of a devastating fire at Tsal’álh in 1948 which began in the village hall and spread to the church; both were burnt to the ground. Subsequently, I discovered that the recording was made by Christine L. J. Clark in 1964 or 1965, and forms part of a small collection bequeathed in 1981 to the Royal British Columbia Museum archives sound recording collection (https://search-bcarchives.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/lillooet- indian-stories). The other stories in that collection have not yet been transcribed. This work would of course have been impossible without Carl Alexander (Qw7ayán’ak), who told one of the stories and helped transcribe the other. It is difficult to do due justice to the immense contributions Carl has made to the documentation of St’át’imcets over the last two decades; his expertise has been simply indispensable. I would also like to thank Lisanne Tevlin, who helped me record Carl’s story, John Lyon, my transcription partner, who proofread the stories and helped with a couple of difficult passages, and Dr. Cathrena Narcisse of the Lillooet Tribal Council, who originally provided me with the Tommy Link recording. This work has been supported by SSHRC Insight grant #435-2015-1694 to the author. Author’s e-mail: [email protected]. 1 Tsal’álh (calá̕ ɬ) means ‘lake’ in St’át’imcets. The tsal’álhmec (calá̕ ɬ-mx) ‘lake people’ historically occupied territory between Seton and Anderson Lakes, along the major water corridor that connects the Upper St’át’imc around the Fraser and Bridge Rivers with the Lower St’át’imc in Mount Currie and further south. Papers for the International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages 55. D. K. E. Reisinger, Hannah Green, Marianne Huijsmans, Gloria Mellesmoen, and Bailey Trotter (eds.). Vancouver, BC: UBCWPL, 2020. While I was checking the transcription of Tommy Link’s narrative with Carl, he remarked that he had actually also been at the scene of the 1948 fire, and that his recollection of how it started differed from Tommy’s. Together with Lisanne Tevlin, I then took the opportunity to record Carl’s version of events in St’át’imcets; the second text which appears here was recorded at Carl’s house in Nxwísten in February 2019. I had also planned a third version of the story. Carl had mentioned that Grand Chief Desmond (Dez) Peters Sr. of Ts’k’wáylacw (Pavilion), who was born and raised in Tsal’álh, had also been at the scene of the 1948 fire. In fact, he had played a prominent part in the events, because it was he who entered the burning church and rescued a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary from the flames. I had recently worked with Dez on some Sam Mitchell recordings made by Jan van Eijk (see Edwards, LaRochelle, & Mitchell 2017), and mentioned that I would like to get his version of the burning church story. However, I was not able to visit Dez that year, and did not see him again until February 2020, when I attended a ceremony at Ts’k’wáylacw honouring him for his recent Lifetime Achievement Award from the First Peoples’ Cultural Council. I asked him again then if he would be willing to record the story of the burning church, and with typical generosity, he readily agreed. But that was the last time I saw him: he passed away less than a month later. For those of us who have worked with the oldest generations of fluent first language speakers of indigenous languages, this is not an unfamiliar story. At the end of his life, Dale Kinkade mentioned, for example, that his greatest professional regret was just missing an opportunity to work with the eldest daughter of Frances Northover, the last monolingual speaker of Cowlitz, who had been living on the Yakima reservation unbeknownst to him for several years. But familiar or not, lost opportunities like this sting, because they are irrevocable, and act as a constant reminder of how much more we could have done if only we had taken the the chance. Dez Peters will be particularly missed. For half a century, he generously shared his unparalleled knowledge of St’át’imc language and culture with linguists, anthropologists, archeologists, and ethnobotanists. He was present when Randy Bouchard first recorded the legendary Upper St’át’imc story-tellers Sam Mitchell and Francis Edwards, and is mentioned in a story by the latter, whom he succeeded as chief at Ts’k’wáylacw. He was an important source of knowledge for ethnobotanist Nancy Turner and archeologist Brian Hayden. Together with Marianne Ignace, he co-wrote the first language primer for Upper St’át’imcets, and was a founding member of the Upper St’át’imc Language Authority. I had the privilege to work with Dez intermittently over many years and will never forget his wisdom and good humour. So in lieu of presenting the missing third version of this story, I dedicate the two versions presented here to Dez’s memory. 1.1 The format The format I follow here is based on the one that John Lyon and I have developed for a series of Upper St’át’imcets text collections that we have been working on over the past five years (see Alexander 2016, Edwards et al. 2017, Lyon & Davis 2018, Mitchell in prep.) Each story is presented first in St’át’imcets, followed by a more or less literal English translation, followed by a fully analyzed version of the text. Tommy Link volunteered an English version of his story, which I have also included, immediately following the literal English translation. A list of glossing abbreviations appears in Appendix I, together with a conversion chart from the variant of the van Eijk orthography that I employ here to the (North) American Phonetic 63 Alphabet in Appendix II. See the introduction in Edwards et al. (2017) for more detailed discussion of the conventions I adopt here.2 1.2 The stories Both stories cover the same core event: the catastrophic fire that burned down the church and community hall at Tsal’álh (Shalalth) in 1948. Carl Alexander’s version, however, includes both a prelude and a post-script, and is therefore twice as long. The prelude describes how Carl’s family were forced to abandon their remote homestead in the Upper Bridge River valley during the fierce winter of 1948 and take temporary shelter in Tsal’álh; the post-script gives the subsequent history of the church and hall, which both burned down a second time, before the hall was finally rebuilt (using concrete) at Sk’il’ Mountain, up the hill from the old site. The two stories differ in some factual details: in particular, they give different accounts of the cause of the fire. Tommy Link attributes it to an overheated wood-burning stove which threw embers out into the hall, while Carl Alexander’s correction has his friend P’xus dropping a lantern, which explodes on contact with the floor. Since Tommy was eating supper when the fire started, and Carl got his information directly from P’xus, Carl’s account is more likely to be accurate. In this respect, it is notable that Tommy takes care to use the quotative clitic =ku7 in this part of his narrative, indicating his account was based on hearsay, whereas Carl’s story contains no quotative marking. In general, however, the two narratives act like interlocking pieces of the same puzzle: they show oral history in the making, constructed partly from direct experience, partly from talking to other eyewitnesses, and partly from third party accounts.

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